New AFD support in brick factories

Thanks to new funding from the French Development Agency – AFD – and the loyal support of the Comgest and Luciole Foundations, our project in brick factories is growing and will now allow four mobile libraries to serve 32 brick factories from October 2023.

A 30 kilomètres de Phnom Penh, on assiste à une industrie en pleine expansion. Ce sont des lieux assez secrets, où aucune ONG ne pénètre : des briqueteries. Des dizaines de familles vivent au sein même des sites de production et travaillent dans des conditions difficiles, dans une grande précarité.

Depuis 2018, Sipar intervient avec deux bibliobus dans 12 briqueteries. L’impact observé chez les enfants est considérable : amélioration du taux de scolarisation, meilleure maîtrise de la lecture et du calcul, meilleure socialisation… Les parents changent aussi leur perception sur l’éducation et saisissent son importance. En laissant leur enfant aller à l’école, c’est l’espoir d’un avenir meilleur.

With this new phase of the project, we will almost triple the intervention sites of the bookmobiles to reach nearly 3000 direct beneficiaries, young and old. In addition to the missions of access to children's education by librarian-educators and awareness sessions conducted by trainers from our partner CWPD, an innovative socio-educational support program will be designed and offered to out-of-school adolescents. The ambition is also to develop micro-libraries, managed by volunteers residing in the surrounding villages. They will allow residents living outside brick kilns to also be able to borrow more than 1000 books adapted to the tastes and ages of each. Thanks to the awareness of brick factories managers and the know-how of Sipar librarian-educators, trainers from our partner NGO, these are new paving stones on the way to the fight against precariousness through the education of hundreds of families.

To go further and reach more beneficiaries, the institutional guarantee is a key step in the life of a project. After the prisons and the program dedicated to youth development, AFD renews its trust in Sipar and its projects in favor of education in Cambodia. Institutional support, in addition to being recognition, allows us to structure our approach and measure its impact. This is a challenge for the team, months of design process and rigor in project management. This support also allows a change of scale of the project, from 12 to 32 beneficiary brick factories.

The trust of the Comgest and Luciole Foundations since the pilot project in 2018 has allowed us to refine our intervention methods in this particular context and to constantly improve the impact of education, reading promotion and schooling support activities. With this new phase, we want to shed light on the future of our young beneficiaries and allow them to consider jobs they dare not dream of today.

Click here to discover the 28 other projects supported by the AFD

Click here to know more about our mobile libraries programme